by Simon May
IG Farben had long supported the Nazi Party financially. It also supplied Hitler’s military with key materials needed to wage war and would go on to exploit vast numbers of slave labourers at the IG Farben Buna plant, which was part of the Auschwitz complex. Carl-Ludwig himself retained excellent connections to the regime. Crucially, as a film director and producer, he was close to the Reichstheaterkammer, the ‘Reich Theatre Chamber’, to which actors had to belong in order to work – and which had expelled Ursel back in 1936.
By 1934 the Reichstheaterkammer had swallowed up the other acting unions and professional associations that remained from pre-Hitler times, and that still included Jews and Mischlinge ersten Grades, or ‘Hybrids of the First Degree’, as half-Jews were known under Nazi law.24 It, in turn, was a division of the Reichskulturkammer, or ‘Reich Culture Chamber’, which had been founded in November 1933 and which eventually brought all cultural activities in the Third Reich under state control.
Joseph Goebbels himself was president of the Reichskulturkammer, which he made an organ of his Ministry for the People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda, and by May 1935 he had stepped up efforts to drive out Jews and other non-Aryans. To be a member of any of its divisions you now had to provide proof of your Aryan ancestry.
To help ensure that non-Aryans were excluded from the Reichskulturkammer and all its divisions, Goebbels appointed a certain Hans Hinkel, a senior Propaganda Ministry official and an SS officer, as one of its Geschäftsführer, or chief executives, as such giving him high responsibility for removing Jews from every aspect of German cultural life.
It is at precisely this time that Ursel, aged twenty-three, finds herself hounded by the Reichstheaterkammer for proof of Aryan identity. She has been sent a questionnaire demanding details of her racial origins, and has repeatedly stalled when reminded to return it. Impatience at the slow purging of Jews from German theatre is mounting among senior figures, including Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess and the Nazi Party’s ideologue Alfred Rosenberg – he who proclaims that ‘The Jewish question is solved for Germany only when the last Jew has left German territory, and for Europe when not a single Jew lives on the European continent up to the Urals.’25 Finally, on 15 April 1936, a new deadline is set for all those who have not yet handed in their questionnaires. Failure to do so, it is warned, will lead to immediate expulsion.26
Which is exactly what happens to Ursel. She is expelled in 1936 after failing to answer a ‘final reminder’ sent by the Reichstheaterkammer giving her ten further days to prove her Aryan status. But seeing no way, back then, to invent such proof, she has already abandoned the world of theatre for the less regulated demimonde of cabaret – where she has joined Isa Vermehren and begun her journey to Catholicism.
So, to resurface as an Aryan in 1941, as she will do, and to be accepted again into the ranks of the Reichstheaterkammer is an astonishing about-turn. It seems that the Duisbergs end up going, on Ursel’s behalf, over the head even of the Reichstheaterkammer, to none other than Hans Hinkel, who in April of that same year has been promoted to the rank of general secretary in the Reichskulturkammer. With his parallel career in the SS and his membership of Hitler’s prestigious ‘Blood Order’, few officials in the entire Nazi state are in a better position than Hinkel to oversee the bureaucratic task of turning a Jew into an Aryan.
Do they get his attention by going to Goebbels himself? Does Hinkel receive financial inducements from the Duisbergs? Does he have designs on Ursel? We don’t know. In the state archives in Berlin there is a file containing Hinkel’s correspondence with Carl-Ludwig Duisberg, including a letter of thanks to Hinkel for his condolences on the death of Duisberg’s father in 1935, Duisberg’s ‘heartfelt’ congratulations to Hinkel on his promotion to Ministerialdirektor, a letter of reference from Hinkel, dated 12 January 1940, attesting to Duisberg’s ‘personal and political reliability’, and, a few months later, an invitation to Duisberg to lead a troupe of actors to entertain German troops in occupied France27 – all of which suggest a close connection between Ursel’s benefactor and the man who is in a position to save not just her career but possibly her life.
What we do know is that Ursel, a young actor with almost no experience, whose most recent work has been in cabaret venues subsequently closed down by Goebbels, who was expelled from the Reichstheaterkammer five long years beforehand, and who has survived in ethnic purgatory ever since, now finds herself invited for an intimate chat with one of Goebbels’s right-hand men: a Nazi personally and professionally dedicated to ridding German culture of people like herself.
The timing cannot be coincidental. Out of the blue, in June 1941, just weeks after Hinkel is promoted to the rank of general secretary in the Reichskulturkammer, his underlings at the Reichstheaterkammer are ordered to send over Ursel’s complete file. Moreover, it seems that she is now permitted to deal directly with Hinkel’s officals in the Reichskulturkammer rather than only with its subsidiary theatre division.
What happens next is mysterious. Perhaps nothing happens save a wait and a documented effort by Ursel to track down proof of origin. In any event, less than four months later, on 23 October 1941, Goebbels’s Ministry calmly informs the Reichstheaterkammer, without elaborating, that it need have no concerns about accepting Ursel as a member and should hasten to pass the good news to her.
The effect is magical. Ursel reapplies to the Reichstheaterkammer, and is immediately accepted. The only problem is that, as a matter of routine procedure, she has to sign a statement assuring them of that wretched Aryan ancestry. Oh, and the statement must be supported by original evidence. She seems to be back where she started. But of course she isn’t. She is able to say that the ‘proof’ is in the powerful hands of Goebbels’s Ministry of the People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda.
Ever diligent, the Reichstheaterkammer writes to the Ministry informing them that they have passed the news to Ursel, though they would appreciate confirmation that evidence of her ancestry has indeed been examined and accepted:
7 November 1941.
52219 B/J/Schf.
To: Reich Ministry for the People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda
Berlin W8
Wilhelmplatz 8-9
Subject: Actress Ursula Liedtke, born 21.10.1912 Berlin
Reference: BeKA 20303 – 19.4. of 23 October 1941
Your decision of 23 October 1941 was communicated orally to the above-named during her appearance here in person. On 3 November, she signed the declaration that she is of Aryan origin. Upon request to produce documents about her ancestry, she stated that her documents have been handed over to you, so that an examination of them cannot be made from here. If proof of parentage is to be checked by you, I kindly ask you to inform me of the result in due course.28
Does Ursel really obtain Aryan ancestry certificates? Is the whole story of her mother’s adulterous fling with Kostas, or whoever was finally chosen as her father, so lacking in credibility, or so perilous to pursue, that it is abandoned? Or does Hinkel simply produce a note expressing satisfaction with her racial credentials, perhaps with the help of an ‘expert opinion’ to this end from obliging colleagues at the Reich Kinship Office? That his role is crucial is suggested by a rapturous and deeply moving letter of thanks to Hinkel, written by Ursel in her own hand just six weeks after the Ministry gets involved in her case:
17.7.41
Very respected Herr Staatsrat,
For weeks now I have been waiting in vain for my father’s papers from Christburg [Ernst’s birthplace]. As soon as I have received these papers, I shall call on you. For the last few weeks I have been with Frau Duisberg in Vornbach [a castle in Bavaria purchased by Carl-Ludwig Duisberg in 1938] – and you can imagine in what a great state of bliss I have been since the day I visited you. Never in my life shall I forget how kind you have been to me and I often talk about you with Frau Duisberg. I will call you immediately when I come to Berlin. Hopefully you too can soon take a few weeks of vacation and relax from your ha
rd work. I am so endlessly grateful to you. You have absolutely given me back my purpose in life.
I send very warm greetings and will always remain indebted to you,
Ursula Liedtke29
Despite my many discussions with Ursel, it remains unclear to me why her declaration of Aryan origin was accepted and how the necessary racial proofs were furnished, if they were. Of one thing she was always sure: the Propaganda Ministry and Hinkel had conjured a miracle. Quite apart from removing all obstacles to her employment, she had heard, by late 1941, that it was getting even harder, if not impossible, for a Hybrid of the First Degree to be allowed to marry an Aryan, a mixed union that had been forbidden under the 1935 Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, except by special permission. Far more seriously, she feared that powerful forces in the Nazi Party were agitating for half-Jews to be consigned to forced labour, and even sterilized. As she saw it back then, without Katta Sterna, the beautiful Jola, Carl-Ludwig Duisberg, and ‘Herr Staatsrat, SS-Oberführer, Pg. [Parteigenosse] Hans Hinkel, Reichskulturwalter’, as Hinkel is addressed in correspondence, she might have no right to a job, no right to marry a German, no right to have children – and possibly no right to live.
14.
Ursel becomes a countess
For two years, Hinkel’s ethnic sorcery worked its magic. Ursel lived more or less in peace and eventually returned to the theatre in Bremen from which she had been evicted back in 1934, moving in with Lexi Alvensleben and her husband Wilhelm Roloff in August 1943. Now in her early thirties, she was entitled to think of herself once more as a genuine German and felt protected from the increasingly drastic measures that, she heard, were periodically threatened against Hybrids of the First Degree, including, from early 1942, calls for them to be deported to concentration camps. Above all, she could now fulfil the role on which, my mother insisted, she had set her heart ever since her teens: that of the aristocrat. Not just to mingle with aristocrats or to call Countess von Alvensleben ‘Mami’, but to gain a title of her own. Indeed, not just to gain a title, but, as she did with all her identities, to become – brilliantly, perceptively, and in her own unique way – the character she had assumed.
Her future husband, Franziskus Reichsgraf von Plettenberg-Lenhausen, had fallen in love with her when he caught sight of a small photo of her on the desk of his cousin, Elisabeth von Plettenberg. Franziskus at once declared that he was going to marry that girl in the photo and that nothing would stop him – an impulsiveness that appealed to Ursel as much as the tall, charming, and humorous man did. Now, in addition to enjoying her new identity, career, income, and safety, she could look forward to the security of marriage to a non-Jewish German. Instead of being an unemployable non-person belonging to a subhuman race, she was about to become the Reichsgräfin von Plettenberg-Lenhausen, part of a family with an ancient seat and a circle of relatives and friends that included many of Germany’s most illustrious aristocratic names: Stolberg, Böselager, Lehndorff, Dönhoff.
An inconceivable distance from Blumeshof 12.
The wedding, Ursel would tell me with relish, didn’t start well. Once more, certificates of ancestry were the stumbling block. Just like the Reichstheaterkammer, the people at the wedding registry wanted the original documents, and those vital papers, if they existed, had to be tracked down, or else invented. A note from Franziskus’s military superior – the ‘Higher Commander of the Flak Training and Replacement Regiments’ – permitting him to marry Ursel and attaching his own proof of Aryan origin wasn’t, of course, enough.
Franziskus was not, however, a man to be detained by petty officials, though he surely knew that permission to marry even a half-Jewish woman would, by now, almost certainly be refused. On the big day, 23 September 1943, they arrived at the civil marriage office in Hamburg, he in his Wehrmacht uniform, she in a simple dress and flat shoes, carrying a posy of flowers.
‘We cannot marry you unless the lady has her birth certificate and proof of her parents’ ancestry,’ the official snapped. ‘You should know such things and not waste this office’s time.’
But he hadn’t reckoned with the groom’s temper.
‘If you do not marry us now, and drop your pathetic zeal, I will fell you with a blow the like of which you have never experienced,’ boomed Franziskus at his would-be nemesis. ‘This is a time of war and the Reich needs fighting men, not bureaucrats at desks!’
The official looked terrified, then confused, and finally submissive.
‘Sir, I am not allowed to—’
‘You are speaking to a Count of the Reich and you will marry us now!’ Franziskus bellowed at the man, whose normally infallible weapon, a little rubber stamp that bore a swastika crowned with the name of his office, was trembling in his hands. ‘And do not waste the time of an officer of the Wehrmacht! Your superiors will hear from me about your obstructiveness!’
‘Sir, if you and the lady come back with the necessary papers, then I will certainly . . .’ And the man’s voice sighed a helpless official sigh.
Franziskus’s face flushed and he was about to lunge at the bureaucratic impediment. ‘Get on with it, or you will not know what has happened to you!’ the Count bellowed, not even giving the official time to get into his obsequious stride.
The marriage achieved, Franziskus left for military duties in the Netherlands, where he was stationed with the occupying German forces, while his bride returned to Bremen.
15.
The Gestapo comes calling
Ursel’s new-found security was to be short-lived. It might have been the humiliated official at the wedding registry, his suspicions aroused, checking on her racial origins or notifying higher-ups of her failure to produce the evidence. Or perhaps another bureaucrat noticed the words ‘two Jewish grandparents’ that were still on her Bremen resident’s registration card, which nobody had looked at since she last lived in the city in 1934 but had been dug out again when she returned in August, a few weeks before her wedding.
In Berlin she had been left in peace for two years after being deemed a non-Jew. But now, just one month after the wedding that should have made her even safer, she was investigated again, this time by the Gestapo.
All we know is that someone in Bremen’s official registry of inhabitants, the so-called Einwohnermeldeamt, scribbled a note in Ursel’s resident’s card, her Einwohnermeldekartei: ‘Gestapo enquired on 21.10.43.’
Not long afterwards, a man approached her at night in a barely lit street as she was walking home after a performance at the theatre.
‘We know who you are,’ the voice said. ‘We would advise you to disappear at once.’
With that, he walked away.
Ursel’s Aryan status had gone up in smoke: for all Hinkel’s efforts, Ernst could not be eradicated. News of her extramarital paternity had clearly not reached Bremen, and the dreaded word ‘Jude’ still stained her file, attracting attention to itself like a shrieking siren. All doors were about to slam shut once more.
The unknown man must have been well-disposed to her, or she might have been arrested on the spot.
She rushed back to Lexi’s home, and from then on seldom ventured out. But to hide where she was officially registered as living was hardly a smart way to disappear; she obviously had to flee the city.
Where was she to go?
She told me that she toyed with returning to Berlin and somehow melting into the capital. But evading its legions of bureaucrats was improbable in the extreme, despite her sister Ilse’s success in doing just that. Then the plan occurred to her: she was going to do what was forbidden to the wife of an officer, let alone to a Hybrid wife on the run. She was going to join Franziskus at the front, in the Netherlands. Once she’d tracked him down, she would demand that he desert Hitler’s army. Then they would both go into hiding.
He was now in real danger too and would surely agree to her plan. If the Gestapo’s suspicions about her were relayed to his superiors, he might be arrested for marrying a half-Je
w without permission – and, even more seriously, a half-Jew who would almost certainly be discovered to have secured her acceptance as an Aryan, and therefore her readmission to the Reichstheaterkammer, under false pretences. And who, in the process, had compromised one of Goebbels’s senior officials.
But how was she to get out of Bremen and into the Netherlands without being detected? Here, Ursel’s acting skills once again came into their own. She decided to disguise herself as a boy and leave the city on foot, only risking public transport when she was well clear of it. So she cut off her hair, dressed herself in men’s clothes, flattened her chest with a corset, and fled.
I am uncertain what happened next. How did she succeed in making the 200-mile journey to the Netherlands disguised as a boy but with only the identity card of a thirty-one-year-old woman to show the German officials whom she must have encountered? How did she manage to enter the garrison where her husband was stationed, or did she get him a message to meet her nearby? Wouldn’t telephoning him to arrange a rendezvous be too dangerous in case of eavesdropping?
Somehow linking up with Franziskus, she demanded that he desert the Wehrmacht. He agonized over the decision for three days and three nights. It wasn’t fear of punishment that inhibited him – it was the dishonour. A patriot and an officer doesn’t desert. Ursel kept up the pressure. And then, with astounding courage, he acted.
He was aware that this decision might mean a lifetime on the run and danger to his entire family in Westphalia, who would likely be treated to Hitler’s policy of collective punishment. If captured, death would be immediate and horrible.
For the next few months they were hidden by peasants in the attic of a farmhouse, thanks to the help of an underground organization. They learned some Dutch from their hosts – from now on they couldn’t risk speaking a word of German – and they forged new identity papers. But word got around that two Germans were living there. Fearful of being betrayed by local Dutch, they moved on to Amsterdam, where they again found a place to hide.
